it is nonsense to pretend that preparation, capacity, and redundancy have no effect, and that they are not only effective marketing topics, but features that are ultimately very important to users.
FWIW, I never claimed that, and I don't think the OP did either. At least for myself, I am very specifically referring to the "black swan event" situation, where something external, unlikely and damaging happens to a competitor. In that case, I don't see how showing some restraint, and not launching a targeted campaign to try and leech their customers, is anti-competitive. And to the extent that you can, somehow, define it so, I would argue that any damage is so absurdly trivial that it can be ignored.
When Rackspace or Amazon Web Services go down, customers recognize that they are fragile, and no one claims that black swan events are irrelevant. The discussion around black swan events revolves around how bad our instincts are when it comes to the high likelihood of rare events. And, the point is that they should not be excluded from our models.
If the two hurricanes and two tsunamis that rose to the level of 'astonishing' during the past decade are the only time that people grasp their likelihood, it is counter productive to treat these events as irrelevant. The same goes for DDoS attacks.
It doesn't matter what people think about this specific issue, since there should be no doubt that there will be many more attempts at this type of vigilantism. No one wants their company beholden to other people's whims and angers, so they should have better defenses. Whether competitors point out their failings or not should be the least of anyone's worries. The capacity to handle attacks up to varying levels of size shouldn't be an impolite or unmentionable subject, it should be a key part of business contingency plans for businesses and their customers.
FWIW, I never claimed that, and I don't think the OP did either. At least for myself, I am very specifically referring to the "black swan event" situation, where something external, unlikely and damaging happens to a competitor. In that case, I don't see how showing some restraint, and not launching a targeted campaign to try and leech their customers, is anti-competitive. And to the extent that you can, somehow, define it so, I would argue that any damage is so absurdly trivial that it can be ignored.